Unearthed chips are rich in history

Roger Baugh was armed only with a coffee cup early Saturday morning, but he'd heard the story of a gold mine of casino chips in a pile of sand behind the AM/PM, and he wasn't going to pass that up.

Construction workers excavating a concrete floor in the former Diamonique Club of the long-vacant Ormsby House had unearthed thousands of Travelodge gaming chips late last week. After getting the OK from bosses to help themselves to some, the remaining chips were left in the sand, which was then dumped in the lot.

Word spread fast, and Baugh was one of about a dozen weekend treasure hunters who found themselves on hands and knees in a downtown parking lot, sifting through sand.

When it was over, he had collected 20 $100 chips, 80 $5 chips and 40 $25 chips.

The find proved true a long-time rumor about buried casino chips, said Al Fiegehen, Ormsby House owner.

"There was an old story that had been bouncing around. I heard in the '80s that there were a whole bunch of chips hidden underneath the floor," said Fiegehen. "It's such an old rumor, and I always thought it was a bunch of BS. The first stories came from contractors and guys that were in the building trade. I can remember hearing about it but never paid much attention."

Fiegehen said the chips probably ended up there after the Travelodge, which stood in the 1970s where Carson Station is now, had to dispose of gaming tokens per Nevada law.

While they were found during excavation of an uneven floor, there is still no time frame for when the Ormsby House will reopen, said Fiegehen.

"We are working as hard as we possibly can to get that place open," he said.

Jerry Markling, chief of enforcement for the Nevada Gaming Control Board, said that generally in years past, chips were sealed in concrete or even dumped in Lake Mead. But neither of those forms of disposal are acceptable any longer. The chips have to be destroyed now.

Among collectors, the Travelodge chips were considered rare, said Doug Johnson, a Douglas County chip collector.

"I looked up those chips in my chip book, and the red chip, the $5 chip, was listed as a high-worth chip 'cause there was only a few known," he said.

In 2009, a red $5 chip sold for $800. The $25 and $100 chips weren't even listed in the book, said Johnson, because no one had any.

With this new find, the market is saturated with the chips. Johnson estimated that 20,000 chips were in the Ormsby pile.

Bill Becker, an AM/PM clerk, said the chips were so plentiful, "I just swept my hands through and game out with two handfuls."

And even though the sand had been fairly well sifted through over the weekend, on Monday visitors to the area were still walking away with a chip or two.

"You'd be lucky to get a buck for them now," Johnson said. "It is a neat thing, though, and the history is worth more to us."

Markling said those who've collected the chips are not doing anything illegal by possessing them, but he warned that people should be aware that it's illegal to try to cash or use a worthless token at casinos.

Someone did just that last week. According to the Nevada Gaming Control board, on Wednesday night a man tried to cash in $2,000 worth of $100 Travelodge chips at the Carson Nugget. While he could have been arrested, he was only warned that it's a felony to attempt to redeem the chips.

Johnson said that because the clay chips were buried in sand, they are in "extremely well condition" for their age. He estimated they were used in the late '70s.

For a seasoned chip collector, finding the pile in the parking lot was a coup.

"I felt like a kid in a candy store," Johnson said of his foray into the sand. "I was grabbing them as fast as I could."

Baugh, a table-game manager at Casino Fandango, had a more personal reason for digging in the dirt over the weekend. When he was a boy, his mother, Delores Baugh, was a dealer at the Travelodge.

Because of the chips' excellent condition, he didn't think they'd ever seen any action at the Travelodge - but if they did, his mother, who passed away in 1993, may have handled them.

"And that's actually cool," he said.